Over the last few days...

I've been meaning to post more. I've been going back and forth between Waterloo and Whitby over the last week and a bit and I just haven't got around to it. I will predictably start with the garden.

The tea plant came in the day after I made my last post. All five seeds are planted and hopefully they will all have germinated by September. Apparently, it takes at least a month and I have to keep them moist. Not having to pay for tea in three years will be amazing. Speaking of tea, I forgot to take some oolong from home before I left...

I now have more strawberry fruits, blossoms and buds than I care to count. I won't even bother counting the tomatoes. The chamomile is also blooming like crazy and I have enough fresh herbs to last a while. The sunflowers are getting big, but the marigolds don't seem to want to germinate - apparently, putting plastic wrap over the pot will prevent the soil from drying out too much as long as you remove it once they sprout. Perhaps I'll try that.

As for other things, take a guess as to what this is.

If you guessed a blueberry and cherry Kuchen, you're right! I made one last night. Here is a picture of it from farther away. It looks much more appealing from that distance.

I didn't get a picture of it before it ended up half-eaten because it looked and smelled so damn good. Tasted just as good, too. I got the recipe from this book here:

Isn't that cover ridiculous? Closeup on the photo of the authors:

Oh my. Now, this picture was taken from my camera phone, so it doesn't quite capture how ridiculous this is. But seriously, look at that hair! Look at that shirt! (Or pillowcase?) Look at those necklaces! I can't even identify the era this book was written by their clothes. I just can't bring myself to believe that was ever in style. I can imagine those ladies looking at it all these years later and saying, "What were we thinking?" Perhaps they still dress that way. That is scary to think about.

My curiosity got the better of me and I looked them up on Google images. They don't. Existential crisis averted.

Just before I left to go back to Waterloo, there was one small piece left. I had three pieces myself. I brought back with me my mom's like-new pastry cutter that she used just once when I was a baby (if I was even born then). The next thing I use it for will be buttermilk biscuits, which I will have with my breakfast over the next few days.

If you have not yet figured it out, I like baking and making fun of out-of-style outfits on cookbook covers. I'm pretty good at both.

And that's it for tonight. I am tired.

Took me long enough.

This time, I'm writing at a reasonable hour. I stay up late because my job keeps me up at night and I just can't rearrange my sleep schedule a few times a week. Hopefully the new Walmart going in down the street will give me a call so I can change that. I miss being able to wake up in the morning without feeling gross.

So, what's new...

Of course, my mind goes right to the balcony garden, but I can't help myself. I love it and I'll hate the winter even more this year.

The tea plant seeds have yet to arrive. They must be stuck in customs. Until they finally do, I'll keep checking every the mail box day. I want to plant them, dammit!

I thought I'd only be growing food, but on Thursday I caved and bought some flower seeds to bring in the bees. I planted dwarf varieties of marigolds and sunflowers. Today, three of the sunflowers poked their little heads out of the soil - so much for seven days to germinate! Sunflowers are my favourite flower and it will break my heart to have to thin them in a few weeks, but I suppose that's better than letting the roots get tangled.

The chamomile is starting to flower like crazy. I'm going to have so much tea by the time the summer is over. I'll have to buy a small window screen to dry the flowers on. Since I cut strawberry runner, the mother plant has blossomed like crazy, and even the baby has two buds of its own. I counted 24 strawberries - fruits, blossoms or buds - in total so far. I can't wait to eat them.

I had to thin the lettuce a week ago from three plants to two, so I put the whole plant I tore out on a sandwich. It will be a while before I can eat any more of it, but it was satisfying. I still have yet to figure out how to make a decent loaf of bread, but I'll get there. Eventually. The recipe I keep using and modifying calls for a tablespoon of yeast for one loaf, which I think is way too much. Once I figure it all out, I'm going to make a sourdough starter and start using that instead.

Aside from food and plants, I've been asked to substitute with the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra for their concert on Friday. It's opera excerpts and it just so happens to include one of my favourite scenes in all opera - the Te Deum from Tosca.

Cornell MacNeil (RIP) was the best Scarpia ever. You can't even look at him - that's how you know he did it right.

Seriously, I'm excited. This makes up for that horrible production of Tosca that I saw in Rome with my high school. Never again will I regret being sober at an opera quite so much as I did when it was finally over. They say that if a theatre is about to fail financially, putting on Tosca will save it - not that one. I went to look it up later only to find that it shut down and now houses one of those "Occupy" movements that seem to have gone out of style now.

How bad was it? Well, the singers were good, and the set was decently decorated, but even the condensed version of Tosca was too ambitious for this theatre, which was better suited to the more economical genre of opera seria (a type of Baroque opera that was popular when the theatre was built). By that, I mean the theatre was too small. The pit could not comfortably fit a full-sized orchestra inside it, so they just used a bunch of keyboards. Just imagine how hilarious a timpani roll sounds on a keyboard! It was enough to ruin it.

The moral of the story: when you go to see an opera, call the theatre before you buy the tickets to make sure they are using a real orchestra. Not that you should have to...

One of these days I'll get around to taking pictures of the balcony garden. In the mean time, have a wonderful day, everyone!

The next day...

Is it just me or has Toronto been a trainwreck in the last few days? I'm glad I haven't been there for either of them. As a side note, I had a dream I lived in an apartment that was attached to the Eaton Center the other night.

As I type, some homemade ginger muffins are in the oven. They smell divine and I can't wait to eat one.

Anyway, I picked up my free box of John Frieda Precision Foam Hair Colour in medium golden blonde at Shoppers. It that was the lightest blonde they had. It turned out to be a coppery colour in the end, but I actually like it. My hair is really thick and strong and always takes longer to colour than it says on the box, which may be the reason it turned out darker than I expected. The box said 20 minutes, but I had it in for almost an hour. I probably could have kept it in longer, but I was worried about overprocessing it.

No exciting updates today on the garden front, but if I feel like it and have time before work, I might just post some pictures of it. I'm pretty proud of it so far.

There is a walking path near my apartment that I like to take whenever I can, and I did on the way home from picking up the box. It is covered by trees and has a lot of wild rhubarb. When it matures I'll pick some and make a pie. There are lots of trilliums, but the flowers were already wilted when I discovered them - kind of abates the barely existing temptation of being all badass and picking one.

Anyone curious about how I came across my free samples that I mentioned yesterday, I found them with the help of a site called Munchkin Sandwich. Click on your country in the sidebar and knock yourself out. I expect this to be a means of cutting down on my living expenses, which is important when you're a dirt poor university student like myself.

My muffin was delicious, by the way. Who needs coherency when you have a good muffin?

Anyway, it is quite late and I really need to try to go to bed earlier than, say, an hour and a half from now - not so easy to do when you sometimes work this late. But since that will be delayed by the fact that I now have a cat on my lap, I might as well write a bit more before heading off. My apologies if it is dreadfully boring, but nothing exciting has really happened in my life recently.

I'm in the midst of finding a second/replacement job. My only complaints about my current job are that I don't get enough hours and the late nights are really doing me in. There will be a new Walmart going in at a nearby plaza in the next few weeks, and I'm hopeful that I will get in there.

And now that the cat is finished with laying down on my lap, I can get to bed. Goodnight, world! Catch you later.

Here, have an introduction.

Today, I jumped on the blog bandwagon. I put no thought whatsoever into what the blog would be about, what it should be called or what I hope to achieve with it - for now, it's just a little plaything. It's kind of like that chemistry set you had as a kid - never mind the instructions, just mix things together and see what you get. You might get the cure for cancer and not realize it. You might get a highly potent fart bomb. Maybe you'll just make a bunch of pretty colours - after all, those sets are child proof.

So here's the inevitable "about me." I have played the flute for the last ten years and I like it enough that I'm going to make a career of it, so I'm about to enter my last year of university for music. As soon as I can afford to take the course, I'm going to start a flute repair business. I originally wanted to perform, but over the years I have come to realize that I tend to do well with mechanical stuff and there will always be more flute players breaking their expensive instruments than there will be opportunities to perform. That, and the expensive dental work that I've been putting off to get my degree would cause a miserable interruption to a performance career.

Enough of that boring crap. My life story can come later.

Lately, I've started to become interested in gardening, particularly when the end result is edible. I'm growing lettuce, carrots, strawberries, peppermint, chamomile, basil, Thai basil and rosemary on my balcony. Once I have a backyard of my own, I'll turn it into a self-sufficient, small-scale farm. I'll barely have a grocery bill - meat, milk and tropical fruit only. Suck on that, agribusiness.

As an amusing side note, I had a dream once that some scientist invented a pill that would make it so that mankind would never have to eat again. (Those "fruitarian" types who only eat what falls off the tree would be thrilled.) As soon as it came out on the market, food production was banned worldwide, but I grew an illegal vegetable garden anyway. I was approached by a government agent who was about to arrest me just before I woke up.

My most recent addition to the balcony garden has been the two strawberry plants. The great thing about that is I only bought one, but it had a well-established runner on it. Both are doing well. The harvest won't be any time soon because I'm trying to keep the runner attached for as long as possible, but it's worth it to have a second plant. I'm not stopping there, though - I ordered tea plant seeds online last night. I'm excited not to have to buy tea ever again... in two to three years. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

As for my boring rainy day today, I spent the entire day looking up free samples. I ordered a USB fan, laundry detergent, Breathe Right strips, acrylic paint, nail polish, shampoo and calcium supplements. I only paid $5 shipping for the USB fan. A few weeks ago I ordered a voucher for a free hair colour kit, a razor and some skin cream. So far, just the hair colour has come in, and I'll be heading out tomorrow to pick it up. I'm thinking blonde.

So that's it. More when I feel like it. Maybe never! Maybe tomorrow. But not today, that's certain.